Ryo Sakazaki is one of the two heroes of Art of Fighting, an early SNK game that had a fairly interesting super move mechanic and was ridiculously difficult. I know I’ve never beaten it, and I’m not even sure if I ever made it to Mr. Big. Ryo is also an infamous copy of Capcom’s Ryu, along with Ryo’s partner Robert as a copy of Ken. The two famously were mocked by Capcom in the character of Dan Hibiki, before becoming a distinctive character in his own right.

Ryo’s appearance in King of Fighters required establishing as canon that KOF occurred in a different timeline than other SNK games, because AOF was supposed to occur 10 years earlier than Fatal Fury, but now Ryo and Terry were fighting one another as friendly rivals. Otherwise, Ryo has little part to play in the Orochi saga. He enters the tournaments to raise money for his dojos, and that’s about it.

I’m not a big fan of Ryo, as I find him even more boring than Ryu. His impressively named moves don’t display a great variety. If there are special tricks to playing him as an especially effective fighter, I don’t know them.

Looking at these statlines reminds me of how little I know about the actual moves in the games- I kinda just go off of how they look with my descriptors . Is the "Swallow Gale Leg" that Hurricane Kick knock-off? What's the "Thunder God's Temple"?

It's funny that the "canon" for the KOF games is basically that Team AOF and Team Fatal Fury constantly lose every time. And to upstarts like Kyo's team, too!

(Note: Leona has had a couple appearances outside of KOF, which would normally make her Power Level 7, but there’s only a couple, and they came about only because she was in KOF, so I kept her a 6.)

Leona makes her first appearance with the Ikari team in KOF ’96. I have never played Metal Slug, so I don’t know anything about her team’s original story. She is the adopted daughter of Heidern from KOF ’94 and joins Ralf and Clark in ’96 to spy on Geese Howard. However, Goenitz reveals her Orochi heritage, which eventually leads to her violent transformations and the restoration of her memories.

I’m a sucker for ponytails, so I like that part of her design. Visually, I think she is just OK, though her moves are interesting. This version is not high damage, but she can be played pretty defensively and knocks down a lot.

She has a move called Heidern Inferno, but I was not able to execute it and the training mode didn’t list it, so I decided to skip it. It is an L3 move that she needs to be at Range 0 and in the air to do, but that’s all I know. I also built the Gliding Buster, an extra kick added to the Ground Saber, into the Ground Saber rather than as a separate move.

Last edited by drkrash on Mon Jul 24, 2017 6:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Leona's Introverted Ice Queen persona makes her ridiculously appealing to me, but that blue/olive color scheme just does not work AT ALL. She's 100x better in different outfits. I do like her "Slash" style, though. Nice to see her here- is there any way you could describe her moves visually? I often find it easier to picture offense that way.

I've had a couple requests for move descriptions, but I'm not inspired to do so because they are a real pain in the ass to do. Aside from seeing them in action, any descriptor I'd offer would be so short as to make many of them sound the same, or so detailed that I'd never finish a single character. As much as I want to make these as useful as possible for everyone, I think I need to send you to Youtube for those.

On a different note, it's also worth nothing that my builds are deliberately simple. I look at all the moves in action, and I build them with the obvious and essential Elements they have. That often means I have extra Elements and I usually lazily put them into Increased Damage (Leona was an exception - I had to grab some random Liabilities to make some of her moves).

I have read enough high-level fighting strategy to know that a deeper level of research could add lots of fun Elements like Priority, Fast Recovery, Slow Recovery, and more to better emulate these characters. Again, that's too much work for me to do for this project. I've focused on playable versions that are fundamentally true to their arcade roots. But like any good build project, someone else could offer a much different interpretation of the characters than what I'm offering.

Huh. I definitely need to give this thread a more thorough once over. I just recently got my own copies of FIGHT because I want to take a closer look at the effects system, and seeing actual builds of characters based on it are quite intriguing.

Also, Photobucket has been giving a lot of people issues, so I'll tell you what I've told several people on here: Give Smugmug a try. It's not very expensive, and it gives you pretty much everything you could want in an image hosting site. Definitely the best of anything I've used.

Based on your recommendation in Jab's thread, I signed up for Smugmug, but I haven't re-posted any links. I should get to that. The truth is, I'm writing my ass off for Fight right now, so I haven't had time.

If you're new to the rules, hit me up with questions. I'm obviously happy to talk about it.